What Do the Intellectuals Want?

The Temper of Our Time, by Eric Hoffer. Harper, $3.95

Isaiah Berlin once classified men of ideas as foxes, who know many things, or hedgehogs, who know one thing. If the idea has any merit, Eric Hoffer is surely a hedgehog. The ultimate reality in his outlook is the drive of every individual to make some kind of scratch on the earth’s surface. For some it is satisfied with useful work; for too many others, consumed with “a passionate desire for impressive action,’ > it can never be satisfied. When this constant factor encounters catastrophic change, as in recent history, misfits without a guiding hand emerge who search for a new and important self in mass movements, mass migrations, or mindless protest. The temper of our time is thus impatience. “The future is now, and hope has turned into desire.” With this central theme he explores the clash of generations, automation and leisure, the Negro revolution, man in nature, and the intellectual. The style may be somewhat ponderous and frontal, but Hoffer’s work nevertheless is reminiscent of Aldous Huxley’s. Accompanied by vast erudition, there is the same juxtaposition of apparently unrelated snippets of history and literature that suddenly reveals new and strange insights. Although some of them are less convincing than others, they appear so often in these densely packed pages that it is impossible to read the book without pencil in hand. Hoffer’s special talent is one for packing a lot into a few words, a talent which can invite rebuttal as well as arouse admiration. The categories employed in unqualified generalization about what is and what is going to be, become, perforce, unwieldy. Ours is a time of juveniles, he says, in which an increasingly younger population around the globe spells trouble for everybody. The large number and proportion of the factually young at the present comprise a threat? But a hundred years ago the median age was even lower than it is now, while the modern: teen-ager is a social invention. There were no teen-agers when nineteen-year-old men captained clipper ships and sixteen-year-old women helped run farms and started raising families. The number and proportion of juveniles spell no trouble at all; what does is a condition of tolerated parasitism which confers no real place in the world on the young nor encourages them to do any work in it. Hoffer shifts ground by making juvenility a state of mind rather than a matter of years, and erases his starting point when he cites oldsters of the past who embarked on one youthfully romantic enterprise or another. Juvenility as temperament is then blamed for a host of modern ills; alternately, the ills are held responsible for the temperament. Militant nationalism, for example, “fosters juvenile manifestations in all sorts of people.” ; A self-educated intellectual who has been migratory worker and is now longshoreman possesses many advantages. He can ignore the fashionable dicta being peddled by the quiz—masters of academe, go his own way, and measure everything he reads with his concrete knowledge about the workaday world. In an apparent aside to Gunnar Myrdal, Hoffer says that the people he has known and worked with all his life have not the least feeling of guilt toward the Negro. This supposedly white dilemma, and a masochistic white insistence upon the Negro’s boundless, timeless grievance, only perpetuates the Negro’s dependence. Since all anyone “can expect from others is that they wish us well,’ the American Negro will never attain freedom and self-respect except by his own efforts. Hoffer’s gratuitous advice to successful Negroes, however, echoes the disappointment and irritation of erstwhile white “friends of the race.” The Negro middle class should set about community building among the Negro masses. This is asking a_ lot. Mutual aid practiced by the various white immigrant blocs was a temporary makeshift that entirely disappeared once the game of individual success took most of them up and out of the slums. As much as anything else, isn’t this what the American experience has meant? Anyway, no one is asking the grandchildren of those immigrants to abandon their suburbs, to go back into the slums and build communities with the relatively few of their own ethnic identification who won’t or can’t make it. Personal experience, invaluable to him on most counts, may have led him astray on the automation issue. The San Francisco docks are more thoroughly automated than any operation outside an oil refinery. This fact could be the possible source of his wildly improbable claim that 90 per cent of the common people (his term) are going to become unneeded and unwanted as a result of automation. The solution for the problem of mass unemployment he envisions? First, retain free enterprise, which has always served the best interests of the common people. Second, establish society as a school. Like the Black Muslims, he wants a separate state—in his case, the state of the unemployed, “and anyone crossing into it would automatically become a student.” Would they want to, any more than the free enterprisers would want to subsidize them? The idea of society as a school is at least as old as Matthew Arnold and Lester Frank Ward, and it remains impracticable. Hoffer is doubtless right when he says that undiscovered talent and genius are abundant in the common people; but it is a general lack of interest and intellectual curiosity rather than of ability that is the rub. The “right accident” of introduction to the life of thought is essential in this country, he says, but the only example he cites is his own happening upon a volume of Montaigne.

AG

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Arnold W. Green

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The Temper of Our Time, by Eric Hoffer. Harper, $3.95

Isaiah Berlin once classified men of ideas as foxes, who know many things, or hedgehogs, who know one thing. If the idea has any merit, Eric Hoffer is surely a hedgehog. The ultimate reality in his outlook is the drive of every individual to make some kind of scratch on the earth’s surface. For some it is satisfied with useful work; for too many others, consumed with “a passionate desire for impressive action,’ > it can never be satisfied. When this constant factor encounters catastrophic change, as in recent history, misfits without a guiding hand emerge who search for a new and important self in mass movements, mass migrations, or mindless protest. The temper of our time is thus impatience. “The future is now, and hope has turned into desire.” With this central theme he explores the clash of generations, automation and leisure, the Negro revolution, man in nature, and the intellectual. The style may be somewhat ponderous and frontal, but Hoffer’s work nevertheless is reminiscent of Aldous Huxley’s. Accompanied by vast erudition, there is the same juxtaposition of apparently unrelated snippets of history and literature that suddenly reveals new and strange insights. Although some of them are less convincing than others, they appear so often in these densely packed pages that it is impossible to read the book without pencil in hand. Hoffer’s special talent is one for packing a lot into a few words, a talent which can invite rebuttal as well as arouse admiration. The categories employed in unqualified generalization about what is and what is going to be, become, perforce, unwieldy. Ours is a time of juveniles, he says, in which an increasingly younger population around the globe spells trouble for everybody. The large number and proportion of the factually young at the present comprise a threat? But a hundred years ago the median age was even lower than it is now, while the modern: teen-ager is a social invention. There were no teen-agers when nineteen-year-old men captained clipper ships and sixteen-year-old women helped run farms and started raising families. The number and proportion of juveniles spell no trouble at all; what does is a condition of tolerated parasitism which confers no real place in the world on the young nor encourages them to do any work in it. Hoffer shifts ground by making juvenility a state of mind rather than a matter of years, and erases his starting point when he cites oldsters of the past who embarked on one youthfully romantic enterprise or another. Juvenility as temperament is then blamed for a host of modern ills; alternately, the ills are held responsible for the temperament. Militant nationalism, for example, “fosters juvenile manifestations in all sorts of people.” ; A self-educated intellectual who has been migratory worker and is now longshoreman possesses many advantages. He can ignore the fashionable dicta being peddled by the quiz—masters of academe, go his own way, and measure everything he reads with his concrete knowledge about the workaday world. In an apparent aside to Gunnar Myrdal, Hoffer says that the people he has known and worked with all his life have not the least feeling of guilt toward the Negro. This supposedly white dilemma, and a masochistic white insistence upon the Negro’s boundless, timeless grievance, only perpetuates the Negro’s dependence. Since all anyone “can expect from others is that they wish us well,’ the American Negro will never attain freedom and self-respect except by his own efforts. Hoffer’s gratuitous advice to successful Negroes, however, echoes the disappointment and irritation of erstwhile white “friends of the race.” The Negro middle class should set about community building among the Negro masses. This is asking a_ lot. Mutual aid practiced by the various white immigrant blocs was a temporary makeshift that entirely disappeared once the game of individual success took most of them up and out of the slums. As much as anything else, isn’t this what the American experience has meant? Anyway, no one is asking the grandchildren of those immigrants to abandon their suburbs, to go back into the slums and build communities with the relatively few of their own ethnic identification who won’t or can’t make it. Personal experience, invaluable to him on most counts, may have led him astray on the automation issue. The San Francisco docks are more thoroughly automated than any operation outside an oil refinery. This fact could be the possible source of his wildly improbable claim that 90 per cent of the common people (his term) are going to become unneeded and unwanted as a result of automation. The solution for the problem of mass unemployment he envisions? First, retain free enterprise, which has always served the best interests of the common people. Second, establish society as a school. Like the Black Muslims, he wants a separate state—in his case, the state of the unemployed, “and anyone crossing into it would automatically become a student.” Would they want to, any more than the free enterprisers would want to subsidize them? The idea of society as a school is at least as old as Matthew Arnold and Lester Frank Ward, and it remains impracticable. Hoffer is doubtless right when he says that undiscovered talent and genius are abundant in the common people; but it is a general lack of interest and intellectual curiosity rather than of ability that is the rub. The “right accident” of introduction to the life of thought is essential in this country, he says, but the only example he cites is his own happening upon a volume of Montaigne.